Powerful compassion

They were the darkest of times, streaked with blood and fear, a terrible time when children died in concentraton camps, gassed to death alongside their parents and grandparents and siblings.  Death held its grip over Poland and all of Europe during the 1930s and 40s.  

Many films have been made about the soldiers who fought to free Europe from Nazi Germany's hate-filled hold.  Young, strong mud-clad male heroes have come to represent the opposing side of that dark conflict. Yet it was a young Polish Catholic woman, Irene Sendler (1910 - 2008), who faced one of history's most heinous political regimes, to whisk little children to safety in Warsaw, Poland. 

She was not much more than a girl herself as she risked death daily to smuggle children out of Poland during the Nazi occupation.  As much as she feared the probability of torture, even death, she couldn't bear that children would be hauled off to camps where they would starve until death came in a gas chamber.  

It's too horrible to think about, even remember.  It was a living nightmare on the big screen of real life. It was hideous and unimaginable what prejudice and hatred could manage to inflict on such precious innocence.  It was a cancer of the human body, one so pernicious that it would take the power of compassion fueled by a kind of superhuman vision, courage, persistance, physical and moral strength to overcome.

Sendler was a social worker and a member of the Zegota resistance organization who worked undercover to rescue Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto.  Armed only with her strong, defiant human compassion, she slipped into a borrowed nurse's role to sneak into Warsaw's ghetto where she persuaded frightened Jewish Polish parents to let their children go to her, to save their lives.  After the children were safely in her care,  she and her resistence group provided them with false documents and sheltering in individual and group childrens homes outside of Warsaw. She is credited with helping to save more than 2500 children.  

She was caught. The Nazi's were on to her skilled smuggling of the children out of Warsaw. Even under extreme torture and certain death, she still wouldn't give up the lists of their names and whereabouts, which she kept in a jar.  She was sentenced to the gas chamber, but as she was being led to her death, she was rescued by members of the resistance organization who managed to bribe a guard for her freedom.

After the war, she attempted to rejoin the children with their parents, but found that most of their parents had died in the camps.


Her simple courage is an amazing testament to the power of one woman's depth of human compassion.  It was stronger than the fear that was everywhere then.  It was stronger than the probability of torture and death.  During her travails, she lost two unborn babies through miscarriage.  Her personal sacrifice was great - monumentally huge - and yet her heart could not have done otherwise. It was even greater.

We can only pray that we also would have hearts that strong and determined. None of us know the future, what may lay in wait for us or our world, but if we prepare our hearts, free ourselves of any ego-based prejudice, selfishness, hatred and fear, we will at the very least prepare the good soil for when heaven calls us into the sacred conflict.  What price would we pay for the children?  What price are we willing to pay right now, today, in our sick, spiritually poisoned world? The evil of this time is less obvious, but children's souls are being stolen right in front of our eyes every day, every moment of every day.  

When we wake up we will see and when we see we will act. We must all wake up and Irene Sendler is one light in this long dark night which may help us see through a new lens.